One thing issue with WizTree is that drawing the result is slow for large trees (a volume with a great many files spread over a the structure) compared to other programs. For one of my local volume at work which happens to include an archive copy of a huge (for VSS) source safe repository WizTree is slower despite the MFT shenanigans because drawing the result after takes enough time to undo the advantage. Though this is on SSD - I expect WizTree would reclaim the speed crown for this dataset on a "traditional" disk, where the reduced random access IO requirements of its MFT scan will be even more significant.
Having retested not I have local access to that filesystem again, the issue seems to be when used remote via RDC, even over a local wifi network. Running properly local the delay goes away in even the pathological case.
As SpaceSniffer has no similar bad slow-down on display updates, I assume that means how WizTree draws interacts badly with the remoting protocol: either it is drawing in small steps and RDC is trying to send each update out individually so many small updates are going over the wire, or the 3D-ish look is causing issues, or both.
I love that the MFT makes utilities like that so fast. I couldn't imagine working without Everything Search. I've never found anything similar for Linux. I think I could do something with locate and a cron job, but that doesn't get instant updates to its database like Everything does.
but updatedb only takes a few seconds to update after it's done a full update, unless you've been fucking around with thousands up thousands of files just recently. Well on ext4, not sure about other filesystems.
I used WinDirStat a lot but I've since switched to TreeSize (free edition). WinDirStat is single threaded so you can't really do anything while it's scanning. TreeSize let's you navigate the tree while the scan is still happening.
